Google Translate is a web application developed by Google for translating text and websites. The translation engine usually works well for bilingual translation between languages with few grammatical differences. However Japanese and English are two languages with lots of differences. Translation between these two languages is hard, especially if you asked a machine to do the work.

As a dictionary engine, Google Translate is the best free engine you can get. If users entered Japanese words into the translation engine, most of the time they are going to get the right English words with equal denotative meaning.

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The performance of Google Translate for word-to-word translation is good. Translating Japanese to English sentences using Google Translate however, may result in sentences with nonsensical or even sentences with opposite meaning.

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The real meaning of the sentence above is “Economy without growth is a serious problem”. However Google Translate result was “Economic development is not a serious problem”. As far as I know, this kind of logic inference is illegal.

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The real meaning of the Japanese sentence above was “If you put banana in the refrigerator, there is some possibility that it would become black.” Grammatically this particular translation result is totally ridiculous. Lots of message was lost in translation. To make the translation result somehow right however, only two words need to be change. We only need to change “Add” with “Put” and “be” with “become”.

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The Japanese sentence above means “It had already over, regretting the failure will not help.” The translation result above is not really bad, a good translator only have to change the position of the words and add one English word to make the translation right.

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The real Japanese meaning of the sentence above was “If you polish this stone, it will become beautiful”. The Japanese word “kirei” could mean either beautiful or clean. Most words in Japanese could have meaning unexplainable by only one word in English.

English-Japanese Transform

The fun part of Google Translate didn’t end up there. If you translate a sentence with enough complexity back and forth between English and Japanese several times, you will notice that the meaning of the translation result would drift farther and farther from the original sentence.

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All these facts however don’t mean that Google translate is totally useless. The language tool is still among the best and most useful you could use for free. However any would be translator should think twice before relying totally to this tool to translate their documents. Human intervention is still required to produce the right translation result.